At Textline, we recognize our customers can have complex Address Books. So, to find and build contact lists we have our Advanced and Saved Searches feature. These two features combined will allow you to identify Contacts based on a formulaic search and then save that formula to reference Contact lists for your Announcement and Survey recipients. Now that is a mouth full, so let us break things down.

At the core, Advanced Search is a way to use multiple criteria to find your Contacts.

So what can you do? In the Advanced Search creation panel, you can search for Contacts that:

You can also do the opposite using the aren't/have not part of the formula builder.

You can also use our AND/OR buttons to make it even more advanced. These act like adding parenthesis to your formula. For example, you could search for All Contacts tagged VIP AND in area code 305 or search for All Contacts who are unreachable OR who have not messaged at all.

If you're confused about any of the search criteria above, we have complete definitions in our Textline Glossary document.

Once you have built your search, you can click the search button and it will return any Contacts meeting your criteria. You will be able to interact with them like you were in the main Address Book, including using actions.

When building any Advanced Search, you can turn it into a Saved Search by adding a name when first building it or after searching, going back, and editing the search to add a name.

Saving a search is important if you want to reference this list later. You can view Saved Searches from the main Address Book by clicking on the Saved Search dropdown to see the top results or heading to the Saved Search page.

To edit a Saved Search, view the Saved Search and see an Edit Filters button near the center of your screen. From there you'll see the Advanced Search builder again. Click Search to save any changes.

To delete a Saved Search, view the Saved Search and you'll see a Delete Search button to the top right.

The other benefit of saving your Advanced Search is the ability to use them as the contact list for your Announcements and Surveys. When looking to send an Announcement or a Survey, you will see a tab in the Recipients selection box for Saved Searches. This will give you a dropdown box listing all the Saved Searches in your account. When a Saved Search is selected, the system will pull a list of Contacts based on the criteria from your Saved Search. If you're sending a scheduled Announcement, it will pull the list just before it is sent, not when it is scheduled.

We hope this article helps! If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to Textline support at +1 (415) 849-4349 or [email protected].